A 29-year-old Mississippi man spent 8 months in jail despite surveillance video showing he wasn’t at the scene of the crime he was accused of.  Arthur Jones, also known as AJ, was 23 years old in July 2015 when he was arrested in the murder case of Jabarri Goudy, 17, who was shot twice outside a club in  Hattiesburg, Mississippi.

Jones who was in Gulfport, Mississippi almost a hour away from Hattiesburg was arrested and charged with murder of the teen, despite video showing he wasn’t at the crime scene according to WLOX News.

“I feel like I lost more than two years because, like I said, I have been dealing with this since I was 23,” Jones told WLOX. “I’m 29 now, so it’s a lot longer than two years. I’m still dealing with this, in search of justice. My justice.”

Court documents issued by US district judge Taylor McNeel on 28 June 2021 shows a detailed story of what happened with Jones since July 2015. The report said detective Neal Rockhold of the Hattiesburg Police Department was given Goudy’s case. Clark, a friend of Goudy who was with him at the time of the murder, met Mr Rockhold and identified a man from a six-person photo lineup as a passenger in the vehicle that shot Goudy. During the same meeting, Clark was shown a photo of Jones following which he claimed that Goudy was shot by him.

Two days later Clark picked out another suspect as the shooter when he was shown a different lineup of six people. Within four minutes of that, Clark picked Jones again and said he was the one who shot Goudy.

The confusion continued as Clark then identified a different person as the passenger in the vehicle, compared to the first person he identified.

Later, Goudy’s cousin, who had first told police he did not see the shooter, picked out Jones from a photo lineup as well.

Jones, who had contacted the Hattiesburg police a day after the shooting to clear his name as his photos were circulating on social media. He was confident about clearing his name, because he wasn’t in Hattiesburg at the time of the murder.

“I expected to immediately be released because I knew I had evidence, surveillance, of me being in Gulfport at the time of the murder but, unfortunately that is not what transpired,” Jones said.

The video evidence of him being in Gulfport was dismissed by the police and the footage was never presented to the court during an initial hearing. This resulted in Jones remaining in jail. In March 2016, Detective Rockhold acknowledged that Jones was misidentified, following which he requested bond reductions from the prosecutor. Jones was released from jail in March 2016, but the murder charge against him remained until October 2017.

In August 2018, Jones filed a lawsuit against the Hattiesburg Police Department, the city of Hattiesburg and the detective who pursued the charges despite the video evidence proving his innocence. The lawsuit is still pending claims he was falsely arrested, falsely imprisonment and denied a speedy trial.

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